[UX/Design] Move all SaaS billing from the portal to GitLab.com
Problem
As a customer, I don't want to have to log in to a different website when I purchase, renew, upgrade or manage my SaaS subscription. I want to stay in GitLab.com.
Customers should not be forced to switch to a different website when they want to do business with GitLab. We should enable them to stay contained inside a website they are familiar with and create a seamless, efficient experience for them where they don't really have to think about billing and payments.
Proposal
Move our SaaS customers billing experience from customers.gitlab.com to GitLab.com. Customers shouldn't have to interact with the portal to manage their billing.
The GitLab.com Billing section could subpages to the effect of:
- Subscription Management
- Payment Methods
- Manage Purchases
This would remove confusion around things like:
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/customers-gitlab-com/issues/351
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/31471
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/customers-gitlab-com/issues/300
Sub-problems to consider
As a group owner, I need to be able to easily manage my group's billing and payment information on GitLab.com
When we move SaaS billing from the portal to GitLab.com, we need to figure out how to handle group owners and billing/payment information. If a group has more than one group owner, who manages the subscription? This could get confusing and messy for group owners as old group owners leave and new ones join. Do we want to allow them all to have billing access? Do we just want to designate one person as the billing person? What if that person leaves?
Possible solution 1
This could be a role called owner + billing - we should consider only allowing one owner in the group at a given time to have this role to avoid conflicts in payment ownership (we also can't show CC information at the group level), but owners should be able to switch which owners have the + billing functionality in case the owner + billing person leaves.
We could consolidate group billing under personal namespaces and deprecate the group billing page. This is what it could look like, incorporating some ideas around billing admin permissions management:
Tim already mocked up something similar here.
Thoughts
How do we want to handle paid user management?